Common ground: Making interfaith marriage work

Can a woman who was born a Hindu and a man who was raised a Christian find happiness as a married couple?

They can if they’re the former Jaya Sharma and Jacob McGarry of Shreveport. The two, who married two years ago in Alexandria with a Hindu ceremony in the morning and a Christian ceremony in the afternoon, even created a blended last name — McSharma.

The couple met in Monroe at Live Oaks Bar and Ballroom. Jacob was playing bass in the band Shayliff. Jaya was working as a physician at Glenwood Regional Medical Center.

The McSharmas represent a trend in the United States, where interfaith marriages are multiplying.

While marrying within the faith is still most common — with 69 percent saying that their spouse shares their religion — a 2014 study by the Pew Research Center found 39 percent of couples who have married since 2010 have a spouse of a different faith compared to only 19 percent of those who married before 1960.

However, a 2007 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, showed Hindus are least likely to marry outside the faith.

Finding commonalities

Jaya McSharma said “no” to two arranged marriages to Hindus before saying “I do” to Jacob. But the decision to marry outside their faith wasn’t taken lightly by either of them.

Just two weeks after they started dating, they had their first tentative religious talk. Three months in, they had a more serious discussion.

“If you find a person and you really want to make it work, I think you have to go into it with a very hopeful optimism and a willingness to sit down and have the hard discussions,” Jaya said. “It was very difficult to sit down with Jacob knowing that if this discussion doesn’t go well, this is done. We’re not going to date anymore. We really had just been dating two weeks the first time we talked, and I was like I really like him and I don’t want to end this now, but I know if he or I are going to be rigid, that we can’t be open to another view, this is not worth pursuing and that’s a really scary risk to take, but you’ve got to do it.”

Jacob and Jaya McSharma(Photo: Henrietta Wildsmith /The Times)

But instead of letting the vast differences between their religions drive them apart, Jaya and Jacob found and decided to focus on commonalities.

“Everything that is important to us about both of our religions that we were raised with is all about how you treat other people and each other and we feel the exact same way and I think most religions do, so once we realized that it was the code of conduct, the code of how you live, that was important to us we realized there was no actual conflict,” Jaya said.

For Jacob, marrying Jaya has been a continuation of a spiritual journey he had begun before they started their relationship, a journey that has led him to believe there is a universal truth found in spiritual experiences that no one religion owns.

“Spirituality is essential to my being and, in the strangest way and in the most fascinating way, it’s become so much more a vital part of my life than it was. I feel so much closer to it than I ever did. It became very personal for me, very much a personal journey. It’s essential to my life and it’s an ongoing investigation for me.”

For Jaya, religious traditions are vital because of the ties they bring to family.

“They’re important to me because of the cultural aspect, not because I believe if I put this statue here and put this flower here that certain things will happen,” she said. “I want to preserve the traditions for my children, for my family and also because that’s what ties me so strongly to my parents, but religious-wise, I’m the same as Jacob. I feel that even though I have Hindu prayers because that’s my mechanism of being with God, it’s the relationship with God that’s important and it doesn’t matter to me which language it comes out in or what you do to get there just as long as there is a tie to something bigger, there’s an appreciation.”